Vir­tual Re­al­ity a hit at Shang­hai tech fair

The newly re­leased Ocu­lus Rift vir­tual re­al­ity head­set stole the show at the April 21-23 China (Shang­hai) In­ter­na­tional Tech­nol­ogy Fair this year, and vis­i­tors had to queue for at least half an hour be­fore they could get just five min­utes with the de­vice.

Ocu­lus VR, the com­pany that de­vel­oped and man­u­fac­tured the de­vice, started out as a Kick­starter cam­paign by Palmer Luckey in 2012. The com­pany was bought over by Face­book in March 2014 for $2 bil­lion.

Face­book re­vealed ear­lier this year ahead of the Mo­bile World Congress in Spain that it had al­ready set up a “So­cial VR” team that will work to in­te­grate vir­tual re­al­ity into its so­cial me­dia of­fer­ings.

While the de­vice is not yet avail­able in China, a staff mem­ber at the Ocu­lus Rift booth said the en­thu­si­asm for the prod­uct in­di­cates that there is a huge po­ten­tial for it to be a suc­cess in the world’s most pop­u­lous coun­try.

This year’s tech fair saw about 1,000 ex­hibitors tak­ing up more than 35,000 square me­ters of ex­hi­bi­tion space. than 150 prod­ucts in­clud­ing smart home de­vices, in­tel­li­gent trans­porta­tion so­lu­tions as well as wear­able tech. The car­a­van also served as a mo­bile train­ing cen­ter that dis­pensed ad­vice on se­cu­rity is­sues in IoT adop­tion.

A pri­vate air­craft touted to be one of the world’s most tech­no­log­i­cally ad­vanced also made its global de­but at the fair this year , at­tract­ing many vis­i­tors. Ac­cord­ing to Krisztina Agnes Kle­sitz, mar­ket­ing man­ager of ByeGrav­ity cPlc, the plane by the Mor­gan Star Group has a start­ing price of $90,000 and can fly a max­i­mum of 60 min­utes per trip.

The Hun­gar­ian com­pany also ex­hib­ited their cut­tingedge ro­tor­craft and glasses-free 3D tech­nol­ogy at the show.

Some of the no­table ex­hibits by Chi­nese com­pa­nies in­cluded a deep-div­ing sub­mersible ca­pa­ble of go­ing to depths of 11,000 me­ters, and its 220 mil­lion yuan ($33.8 mil­lion) car­rier called “Zhang Qian”. Jointly de­vel­oped by Chi­nese pri­vate en­ter­prises in­clud­ing Shang­hai Rain­bow­fish Ocean Tech­nol­ogy Co Ltd, the two ma­chines will be used in a deep-ocean sci­en­tific ex­pe­di­tion be­tween the South Pole and the North Pole in 2017.

Ac­cord­ing to Zheng Wenfa, op­er­a­tion man­ager from Shang­hai Rain­bow­fish Ocean Tech­nol­ogy Co Ltd, the car­rier is the world’s only ex­pe­di­tion ves­sel that is equipped with a deep-ocean, hu­man-oc­cu­pied ve­hi­cle, an au­ton­o­mous and re­motely op­er­ated ve­hi­cle, as well as a lan­der ve­hi­cle.

Zheng added that the car­rier can be used for a va­ri­ety of pur­poses, in­clud­ing sci­en­tific in­ves­ti­ga­tion of the ocean, deep-sea search and res­cue, main­te­nance of off­shore en­gi­neer­ing equip­ment and un­der­wa­ter arche­ol­ogy and film-mak­ing.